Cross System Product (CSP) is a form of procedural programing language, designed as a strategic application generator, by IBM, to provide consistent development and execution environments across multiple hardware platforms and operating systems. The CSP environment is very user friendly for application development and saves coding time by about 70%. However, maintenance of applications developed in CSP is not as easy as the development process in that environment. This is mainly because of the manner in which CSP is structured. CSP is a form of procedural programing language.
A CSP application program consists of various objects such as records, statement groups, processes, tables etc. The program code is written as a sequence of processes and statement groups. A typical application program has one or more main processes that call other processes or statement groups. These may, in turn, call other processes and/or statement groups.
An extract of a typical CSP program is shown in FIG. 1. The process at level 001 is the main process (ie. JFBB44P-MAIN), the contents of which can be viewed by insertion of the letter ‘S’ in the appropriate position in the SEL column, as shown in FIG. 1, followed by a carriage return (i.e. pressing the “Enter” key).
The content of the main process, which contains calls to other processes and statement groups, is shown in FIG. 2. To view and/or edit any particular process or statement group, a user is required to first return to the higher level structure list screen of FIG. 1 and then manually input the name of the particular process or statement group to be viewed and/or edited. A return to the higher level structure list screen of FIG. 1 is performed by pressing “PF3”, a pre-defined computer keyboard function key. Selection of the process JFBB44P-EXE-INIT for viewing and/or editing is, as described above, shown at the top of FIG. 2.
The above process will have to be repeated while navigating through the CSP program. If the program is large, with numerous sub-levels, navigation becomes even more difficult.
Viewing and/or editing any other objects like records or tables, necessitates returning to the list processor screen (this screen comes before the structure list screen shown in FIG. 1) for inputting of the name of the particular object.
These inherent difficulties make analysis and maintenance of program code developed in CSP a laborious task.
Consequently, a need clearly exists for an improved method and/or apparatus for analysis and maintenance of code written in CSP and other procedural languages that substantially overcomes or at least ameliorates one or more deficiencies of existing arrangements.